ArchLinux’s installation process is documented on the Archwiki. I recommend that persons new to Arch try the excellentBeginner’s Guideinstead of theOfficial Arch Linux Install Guide. Though both wiki entries cover similar ground, the Beginner’s Guide gives a lot more relevant information for those new to the system. The Beginner’s Guide is aimed at desktop installation and, as I’m installing a server, I won’t be going through the installation of the graphical environment at all. Assuming that you’re following my installation, assume that I’ve followed the Beginner’s Guide right up to and including the installation of sudo. I installed the ssh daemon afterwards rather than during the initial setup however.

A few small recommendations and notes regarding installation:

If you can, consider using a USB memory stick for the installer and keep it handy for future installations.

I keep a copy of my local “repository” of installed applications on my installer memory stick. Once installation is finished I save a bit of download and update time by copying this to the new server’s /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ folder. The repository on my desktop is typically 1.7GB

For the rc.conf, South African-appropriate regional settings are:LOCALE=”en_ZA.utf8″TIMEZONE=”Africa/Johannesburg”

I’ve set up the network very simply, according to the guide, and will be expanding on the network setup in a later post.

As it is for a server, my non-privileged user on the server is only part of 3 groups: wheel (for sudo), storage, and users. A desktop user will likely be in many more groups.

I prefer using an application calledyaourtinstead of Arch’s defaultpackage manager. Yaourt has the exact same usage syntax as pacman except that it supports a few extra options. It is actually a wrapper application in that it, in turn, uses pacman. Importantly, yaourt supports installation of applications from Arch’sAUR. TheAURis a repository of installation scripts built by Arch users for Arch users to easily install applications that are not officially supported by the main Arch repositories. Yaourt can download and install applications from AUR or the main repositories with the same command, treating the AUR as “just another repository”. Pacman unfortunately does not support this.

Again, the installation is covered in thewiki. I recommend the easy route mentioned in the wiki if you’re new at Arch. Its too much too soon to do it the hard way (also mentioned in the wiki entry).